It just never ends.

The lack of public accountability of senior managers (with those pay rises & reliance on management consultants) across the UK HE sector is a scandal comparable to the privatisation/corporatisation of other public services; universities are now ultimately ruled by former bankers & their worldviews.

🚨 1 in 4 staff at Goldsmiths to be axed. All while senior management get eye-watering pay rises and £16m is spent on consultants and lawyers. This is the reality of Higher Education in the UK. Our members have voted for industrial action, support them. www.ucu.org.uk/article/1447...

The wonderful Lavender Menace in Edinburgh are doing a fundraiser to support their operating costs! They've been able to do so much as a staffed organisation - it will be so good for queer life in Scotland if they can keep going: www.crowdfunder.co.uk/p/save-laven...

In what (I hope!) will be the first in a series of events taking To the Lighthouse *back* to Skye, Bethan Roberts and I will be leading a workshop in Portree on Tues 5th May, reflecting on how Woolf's novel resonates with sustainability, housing, and tourism today atlasarts.org.uk/programme/to...

This goldfish breaking the fourth wall from its bowl with a reflection of a window to the outside world (in James Cadenhead’s 1886 ‘Lady with a Japanese Screen’ at the wonderful Edinburgh City Art Centre) is like a whole modernist novel in one morose fishy gaze.

UCU Edinburgh picketers finding the sun in George Square on the first day of this week‘s strike @ucuedinburgh.bsky.social

We're on strike again! You can read more about why here: www.ucuedinburgh.org.uk/blog/d8mewmx... University management not sticking to their word? Who would have thought it? Please spread the word!

UCU Edinburgh STRIKE✊🩷

As @ucuedinburgh.bsky.social begins a week of strikes, against massive, unnecessary cuts, and while senior managers still receive fat-cat style pay rises and perks (despite what to external eyes looks like mismanagement), I wonder if this kind of example might begin to prick their consciences?

On 16th April, join me and @peterjcherry.bsky.social for a webinar on the travel grants and research support available for UK university students via the @thebiaankara.bsky.social - biaa.ac.uk/events/webin...

On the one hand, more power to these students, on the other - I am meant to be giving a lecture on The Lonely Londoners in this building this afternoon😞

#OtD 27 Mar 1943 gay anti-fascist Willem Arondeus led a group in bombing the Amsterdam Public Records Office that Nazis used to identify Dutch Jews. Arrested, before his execution, Arondeus wanted it to be known that "homosexuals are not cowards." stories.workingclasshistory.com/article/9931...

Edinburgh staff urge university to ditch OpenAI deal: www.timeshighereducation.com/news/edinbur...

today’s dawn chorus: blackbirds, robins, blue tits, great tits, sparrows, wrens – and some nest-building magpies putting them all in their place.

#InternationalWomensDay Helen Carr (1940–2025) was one of the outstanding modernist scholars of her generation, and a longstanding member of the London Modernism Seminar Join us on 9 May 2026 for a roundtable discussion dedicated to the memory of our dear friend and colleague BOOK NOW 👇

Ambivalent about much of IWD, but any excuse to post some Jill Posener

Via Jamaica Gleaner: "Retired former Prime Minister P.J. Patterson is calling for African and European nations that have benefited from Cuba’s decades of international solidarity to now stand in support of the Caribbean island." Read more: jamaica-gleaner.com/article/news...

“For Domingo, however, the pen was the primary tool he chose to campaign with throughout his life” Red and Black in Harlem and Jamaica by Peter Hulme and Leslie James reviewed in Morning Star: morningstaronline.co.uk/article/comp...

In honor of the publication day of The Enclosures of Free Verse (uncpress.org/978146969306...), here's a little thread about what the book does and does not offer.

The John Hope Franklin Research Center is pleased to share that the archive of philosopher, scholar, and author Sylvia Wynter will be opened to the public beginning March 3 blogs.library.duke.edu/rubenstein/2...

On my way to strike and picket this morning at (checks notes) Edinburgh Napier University, over (checks notes) redundancies in the institution barely a year after Prof Nolan's departure...

May Labour's Yvette Cooper, the former Home Secretary, be remembered always as the politician who imposed the ban at the behest of Britain's powerful weapons industry, so it could continue to profit from the deliberate massacre of the people of Gaza

What a turnout! Great to join @ucu.org.uk @unisontheunion.bsky.social & @unitetheunion.bsky.social and students at University of Essex taking action to save jobs in Colchester and Southend. Time for the University to rethink its plans and engage positively with staff & their unions.

anyway the consultation shuts tomorrow, one minute to midnight UK time: www.gov.uk/government/c... Amnesty have some good guidance here. Go on: media.amnesty.org.uk/documents/Am...

my unpopular basic opinion that I will probably delete is that sport has a grossly outsize place in our current world– eclipsing other forms of fun, pleasure, community & how we experience nature– and its valorisation of competitiveness & physical strength are a large part of why we are where we are

DREAM job: two-years of full-time research on Radclyffe Hall's The Well of Loneliness and its various histories www.jobs.ac.uk/job/DQI985/r...

In contrast to all those Ivy League professors who seem to have spent their careers aspiring to mix with people like Epst*in, Chan and Natalie Zemon Davis are the humane, principled, and truly brilliant academic role models we should be looking to.

PUB DAY of In the Spirit of H. Chandler Davis, the remarkable set of essays inspired by the UMich prof fired in 1954 for refusing to testify to HUAC. The book’s 12 contributors argue against the suppression of protest, the policed campus, and other enemies of academic freedom. disobediencepress.com

In June 1937 Nancy Cunard, on behalf of various left-wing thinkers, asked 'writers and poets' to state where they stood on the Spanish Civil War. Although the focus was on Spain, the question was framed in terms of anti-fascist internationalism and commitment: 'ironic detachment will no longer do'.

Could any book possibly live up to this cover? (it’s A. E. Coppard, ‘Nixey’s Harelquin’, 1931)

Doing my bit to foment republican dissent at the bus stop this morning as the whole city comes to a stop to allow Princess Anne’s car to drive down the Mound.

David Bowie's fifteen favourite records are today's essay marking music: www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m... Hard and heartbreaking to think it's been ten years. ⚡⚡♥️⚡⚡

1/2 🧵 🚨 Just in time for the holidays! We’re thrilled to share ROAPE Special Issue 186, Vol. 52, celebrating the centenary of Frantz Fanon’s radical life, work and legacy 🎄🔥 Editorial: #Fanon100: Class Struggle and the Future of African Liberation buff.ly/gASaoZD

'Now, having cried my cry, & the sun coming out, to write a list of Christmas presents.' Virginia Woolf, 7th December 1925 (a bit depressing to think that a hundred years ago Woolf was ahead of me with her Christmas shopping planning)

Check out these amazing keynotes for Weird Modernisms - and there's still time to propose a paper or panel: www.moderniststudies.org/conference/M... @moderniststudies.bsky.social

A Christmas song for the ages, from a Spanish Civil War songsheet (brought back from Spain by my grandmother). ♫ Hark the rebel workers sing Down with every priest and king Unearned wealth and hunger wild These cannot be reconciled. ♫ More info here: redthirties.wordpress.com/2018/02/13/h...

Detail from John Banting’s 1953 Christmas card and detail from a gorgeous student-made card, 2025

John Banting's Christmas card for 1953

The wonderful Laura Wheeler Waring's cover for the December 1928 Christmas issue of The Crisis. Full issue online here: archive.org/details/sim_...

British Library staff asked for a decent pay. Instead they got ‘a few money-saving present ideas’, such as ‘consider not giving presents this holiday season’. They are on strike this week. I wrote about it for @lrb.co.uk. www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2025/de...

If (like me) you are spooked by the 'killer' flu news but have not been able to get an appointment for a jab, I can report that the Edinburgh university pharmacy on Bristo Square is offering walk-in appointments - apparently they have lots of stock and want university staff in particular to know!

It somehow is always the widening participation programmes that are the ones that get cut first, that get deemed dispensable. Shame on @universityofessex.bsky.social. Transforming society for the better is #UKHE 's role, Essex's in particular. Have you forgotten what you were established for?

In yet more devastating news, the VC has confirmed her plans to cut 80% of academic staff from Essex Pathways, our foundation year department. This would effectively close down all our existing foundation year programmes through the back door. But it's not a done deal yet. Please share urgently.

Postwar austerity meets mid-century cosmopolitanism in 1949 egg recipes. Obsessed, and will be serving eggs boiled for twelve hours in Turkish coffee at at least one Christmas party.

someone (not sure who?!) has messaged me on here - but I can't access it. if it's important, please email me instead!

A lovely article to mark forty years of the wonderful Peepal Tree Press - including this discussion of the contemporary scene, and the novel form: www.theguardian.com/news/2025/de...

sometimes the universe does provide: I misread the first poster as 'Couscous Edinburgh' and was disappointed to realise my mistake. But then, 30 seconds later, another poster: Edinburgh's Couscous Festival!! (no shade on Conscious Edinburgh - I'm sure it's great! but couscous is couscous)

In April 2020 I bought a 10kg sack of Elephant Atta chapatti flour which I have since used for absolutely everything (bread, crumble, sauces, many many birthday cakes) – even if at a depreciating post-lockdown rate. Tonight I used the last of it – does this mean my pandemic is finally over??